Subscribe
404 Media is an independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
The general who advised Netflix’s nuclear Armageddon movie doesn’t believe in abolishing nuclear weapons.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Court records show Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a part of ICE, and the FBI obtained Con Edison user data. The utility provider refuses to say whether law enforcement needs a warrant to access its data.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
These anti-facial recognition glasses technically work, but won’t save you from our surveillance dystopia.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
DNA from the teeth of French soldiers that died in the disastrous 1812 retreat from Moscow revealed previously unidentified pathogens.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
The Canadian Centre for Child Protection found more than 120 images of identified or known victims of CSAM in the dataset.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
Andreessen Horowitz is funding a company that clearly violates the inauthentic behavior policies of every major social media platform.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
This week, we discuss Pavlovian Chartbeat response, when to say "cum," and the wave of making things for humans, by humans.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
There is no evidence the Instagram and Facebook account, called Montcowatch, sells anything. Lawyers from the ACLU say the move is "wild outside the scope" of DHS' authority.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
The first application of enteral ventilation—aka breathing through the bum—to humans proved the technique is safe.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
An analysis of how tools to make non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes spread online, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shows X and search engines surface these sites easily.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
The app, which went viral before facing multiple data breaches, is currently unavailable on the Apple App Store.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Hackers targeting ICE and other agencies; Wikipedia's AI problem now has some data; and OpenAI's inevitable pivot to sex bot.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
After condemnation from Trump’s AI czar, Anthropic’s CEO promised its AI is not woke.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
Just two months ago, Sam Altman acknowledged that putting a “sex bot avatar” in ChatGPT would be a move to “juice growth.” Something the company had been tempted to do, he said, but had resisted.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
Major outlets said the President dumped "brown liquid" that "appeared to be feces" in an AI-generated video. They refused to call a spade a spade, or poop, poop.
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
Watch 404 Media’s first short documentary, about an artist keeping real neon signs alive.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
The same hackers who doxed hundreds of DHS, ICE, and FBI officials now say they have the personal data of tens of thousands of officials from the NSA, Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency, and many other agencies.
404 Media
• Becky Ferreira
A massive black hole feasting on a star outside of a galactic nucleus was observed in bright radio waves for the first time.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
This week, we discuss crowdsourced resistance and a big government data dump.
404 Media
• Matthew Gault
"What if I could create Théâtre D’opéra Spatial as if it were physically created by hand? Not actually, of course."
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters—one of the latest amalgamations of typically young, reckless, and English-speaking hackers—posted the apparent phone numbers and addresses of hundreds of government officials, including nearly 700 from DHS.
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
404 Media
• Emanuel Maiberg
AI-generated Reddit Answers are giving bad advice in medical subreddits and moderators can’t opt out.
404 Media
• Samantha Cole
The plaintiffs claim that without the payment processors, which include CCBill, Epoch, and several others that process "high-risk" merchant payments, GirlsDoPorn would not have been a commercial enterprise to begin with.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Videos demoing one of the sites have repeatedly gone viral on TikTok and other platforms recently. 404 Media verified they can locate specific peoples' Tinder profiles using their photo, and found that the viral videos are produced by paid creators.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Flock has built a nationwide surveillance network of AI-powered cameras and given many more federal agencies access. Senator Ron Wyden told Flock “abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable” and Flock “is unable and uninterested in preventing them.”
404 Media
• Jason Koebler
In an example of egregious planned obsolescence, as many as 400 million computers will soon hit the waste stream.
404 Media
• Joseph Cox
Meta tells its metaverse workers to push harder with AI; the massive Discord breach; and what happened when AI came for craft beer.
